Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

EVENTS

Fischer: Women can make more difference in the world by staying home

I have to stop following this guy’s nonsense. It’s just not good for my blood pressure.

Hear that ladies? Barefoot and pregnant and pouring the word of God in your kids’ ears is how you’ll change this world. Forget about all that participating in society, working, voting or having dreams or aspirations of your own, get back in the kitchen and bake something for your family instead. And hurry up about it, it’s almost bible study time. Also, stop trying to go find a job — you can’t be working in your delicate (e.g. pregnant) condition.

If the impact I have on the world is so bloody great for staying home with my kids pay me for it.

Now that that’s out of the way, any parent can have a major impact on a child’s life by spending time with him or her.

1) It’s what you do with the time you have and not how much of it you have.

2) A bad stay-at-home parent is not better than an attentive working parent.

3) A parent who can afford child care, can give her/his children more by working and bringing more income into the house. That income can go towards cultural education on the weekends, pay for tutors in subjects that the parent isn’t up on, go towards an education fund that could guarantee the children debt-free educations.

I stay home with my kids because – due to the cost of child care where I am – it would cost more for me to work than to stay home. I love my children and love spending time with them, but at the same time I hate being defined solely in reference to my children. I’m not William the Bloody’s mother, I’m Erin. Unfortunately, I so rarely get time to do things that I love that I lose track of who I am and even in my own mind I become my children’s mother.

Suggesting that parents stay home to make their children better people ignores the needs of the parents. Any parents who want to stay home shouldn’t feel like they shouldn’t but on the flip side, any parents who want to work shouldn’t be held back and some over-inflated sack of hot air doesn’t have the right to shame them into what he wants.

Well, I will admit that my mother staying home probably did have a bigger impact than going to work. I spent so much time avoiding her anger and hatred and unhappiness that I read all the time under my bed, and ended up getting a Ph.D. in Biology (which horrified my mother, because that was no place for her daughter). If she’d gone out to work, without any skills, she’d probably have had much less impact running the cash register at the convenience store.

On the other hand, if she didn’t approach the world the way Fischer does, she might have gotten skills, become something, and quit hitting her children with extension cords.

Funny that he notes that dads can still be invested in the lives of their children as well as going out to make a mark in the world that doesn’t involve living vicariously. I guess he thinks ladies can’t multitask?

I’m currently pregnant, and this idea in its many forms drives me nuts. I might be working about half-time relatively soon after I have the kid, with my husband taking a chunk of parental leave to help the transition, and it’s amazing how many people are shocked I don’t want to be off work for a year, or claim I’ll change my mind. With my work and the flexibility my husband has, we can probably split childcare with minimal daycare – if it doesn’t work out, well, we’ll revisit.

And if I hear “being a stay at home mom is the most important job in the world” from one more woman on a pregnancy board, I will scream. Important? Sure. Rewarding? Depends on who you are. The best choice? Depends on the family.

But… for the next generation to reach adulthood, they need food (a safe food supply too), clean water (So some kind of water infrastructure is necessary, or some treatment system), a good environment to live in (and all that entails – clean air, not being in the midst of armed conflict…), health care, and a million other things, many of which people provide at their jobs every day. Someone designs the cars they ride in, including the safety features that may have kept them alive without them knowing. Someone produced the apples they eat with lunch. Someone built the houses they live in. Someone designed a way to heat that home without as much air pollution as a coal fire. You can argue about how necessary beneficial any specific thing is, but a “frontier wife” wasn’t devoting most of her time to the children, with so much production necessary to keep the family alive.

So, sure, raising kids might be one of the most important jobs in society. But in a very real sense, there’s a lot of paid work that is a part, however small, of raising everyone’s kids. It’s not just the money that is brought into the house – it’s shaping the world that those kids will inhabit.

Sure, you can raise your kids to help shape that world, but they’re not your ideological clones, they’re human beings with their own choices to make. I’ll give my unborn kid that much respect – at least, I’ll try.

(Sorry to get rant-y on a blog I don’t usually comment on – I’m just on a hair-trigger about this lately. Weirdly enough, my mother thinks changing the world through the next generation should include offering to come babysit while I work for the first few months.)

@Carolyn: Yay for spousal splitting of childcare, part-time/flextime work, with minimal daycare – to all appearances, it seems to have worked for my family. In the 1980s, I found it completely unsurprising (though unpleasant) that people thought me weird for even wanting to do this sort of thing – when I told my manager that for my 2nd kid I was going to take 6 weeks off, then return to work while my husband (aka Eamon Knight) stayed home fulltime with the 2 kids for 6 months, he asked why my husband would want to do that. In 2012, I find it surprising (and still unpleasant) that this attitude appears to not have appreciably changed.

@Theo Bromine – A friend of mine took a lower paying job (customs agent, of all things) for the 8-4 hours, rather than stay in a 60 hour +/week business job. His wife works evenings. He also took 8 months of parental leave at least once, since he had the topped up salary. I’ve taken inspiration from the fact that they’ve made it work with 3 little kids over the years, doing this “equal parents” thing. There’s precious few models for it. It always makes me crazy how parenting is framed as a women’s issue only.

The woman came from a man’s rib. not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from the side to be equal, under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved. She can do what a man can do.

The woman came from a man’s rib. not from his feet to be walked on, not from his head to be superior, but from the side to be equal, under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.

And with a body to be exploited in the interest of selling beer?

To be clear, I rather like beer (especially microbrews), and have no objection to (consensual) displays of all or part of any human body, but having a naked blonde woman on a beer bottle label looks to me like objectification.